American Kingpin

by Nick Bilton

  Green arrived at the Marriott with his lawyer and immediately began babbling on about how the ruthless Dread Pirate Roberts would soon surely send his goons to have him killed. He was so petrified he couldn’t sleep, he said. He kept peering out of his window in Spanish Fork, fearing that someone would come and tap on the door and that would be the end of Curtis Green and his two Chihuahuas. Green went on like a scared teenager telling the principal about some bullies that would get him after school.

  Green had always been a rambler and, as Carl soon believed, a weakling. In high school Green’s classmates had called him “the Gooch.” At the time, young, chubby Green didn’t know what the term meant and laughed along with the other boys when they referenced him by that nickname. It wasn’t until years later that he found out that a gooch was the area on a man’s body between his scrotum and his asshole.

  Carl could easily see why the nickname had stuck. After a few minutes of his rambling, Carl wanted to slap him or tell him to shut the hell up, or both. (Gooch!) Green seemed as nervous as his three-pound Chihuahuas. Sometimes he whimpered as he spoke to the Marco Polo task force about his role on the site and about the dreaded Dread Pirate Roberts. At other times he pleaded, “I’m just a good Mormon boy.”

  Eventually, after a couple of hours of questioning, Green’s lawyer (who was apparently the worst lawyer in Utah) grew bored and decided to leave, noting that his client should just tell the cops everything he knew. As the lawyer walked out, the Gooch started crying. Carl thought about how pathetic this man was and how he was everything Carl hated in the world: not tough enough to stand up for the choices he had made.

  At around noon, exhausted from hours of interrogation, they decided to go down to the restaurant of the Marriott Hotel and grab lunch. As everyone ate, Carl logged on to his laptop as Nob to chat with DPR and see if he knew more about the man sitting across from him. It was then, as Green sat eating french fries and trying not to upset his DEA captors, that Dread told Nob what had happened. One of his employees had stolen some Bitcoins, and he wasn’t happy about it. “Not a ton of money,” DPR said as they began typing to one another, “but it pisses me off to no end.”

  “Who is it and where is he,” Nob wrote back as he looked up from his laptop at the Gooch, who nervously looked back.

  “I’ll send you his ID,” DPR replied.

  Nob immediately asked why he had this man’s ID.

  “I had him send it to me when I hired him,” Dread wrote back, “for just this kind of situation.”

  As Carl chatted with Dread, he played dumb about what had happened with his kilo of cocaine, but he was also surprised that Green had the audacity to steal $350,000 in Bitcoins shortly after he had been arrested. “You stole money from DPR?” Carl asked Green, shocked that the Gooch would do such a thing. Shaun, who had really stolen the money, just watched silently.

  “No!” Green replied, panicked. “You’ve gotta be kidding me. I wouldn’t even know how to steal a penny from him.”

  “Just admit it!” Carl yelled. And then Shaun jumped in too. Shaun’s glare was intimidating, with his narrow, snarly eyes. “Just admit you stole the money!”

  “I didn’t!”

  “Why are you protecting him?” Carl asked.

  “I didn’t do it!” Green sobbed.

  During this exchange, a request from the Dread Pirate Roberts popped up on Carl’s computer screen asking if he knew anyone who could beat Green up and force him to send the money back. Given that Carl was posing as a big-time drug smuggler, he told DPR that of course he knew people who could do that kind of work.

  “How quickly do you think you can get someone over there?” DPR asked. “And what does that cost you?”

  Carl looked up from his computer and informed Green that his day was about to change—slightly. Green, still rambling, was terror-stricken as he heard what they were going to do next. They would have to make the beating look real, Carl informed Green. DPR wanted evidence.

  They returned to the hotel room, and Carl told Green to go into the bathroom. The tub was filled with water. The camera clicked on, and the postal worker thrust Green under, his arms waving as he gasped for air. His screams sounded like a rumble under the water. He couldn’t breathe. And then, after a few seconds, the postal worker yanked his head out by his hair and held the drowning man’s face up to a video camera as the Gooch panted, trying to regain his breath and making every effort possible not to cry again.

  “I think we should do it again,” Carl said as he peered over the video camera at Green’s pathetic-looking face. The postal worker agreed, grabbed Green’s head again, and pushed him back under the water. It was pure chaos, like Lord of the Flies, but rather than children trying to kill poor chubby Piggy, special agents with the U.S. government were drowning the Gooch.

  Green begged them to stop, but they did it again and again. “We have to make it look real,” Carl sneered.

  “I swear,” Green said as his face was pushed under the water again, “I didn’t steal the money!”

  “Just admit it!” Carl yelled back at him. “Stop trying to protect DPR!”

  And yet while all this was going on, there was one person who was not in the bathroom. Shaun of the Secret Service had told the others on the task force that he was going to take Green’s laptop and submit it into evidence at the nearby bureau. But instead he was going to use it to steal more money from the Silk Road, money that no one knew he was taking. As Shaun closed the door behind him, the sound of the Gooch’s cries echoed through the hotel suite in the Marriott as Carl continued to yell at him. “Just admit it, you piece of shit!”

  “I swear,” Green wept. “I didn’t steal a penny!”

  Chapter 42

  THE FIRST MURDER

  Ross had figured that one day it might come to this. That one day he would be faced with this kind of ruthless decision—to “call on my muscle,” as he’d told an associate. When that day came, he’d imagined that maybe he would have to end the life of a dealer gone rogue or someone who threatened the mission of the Silk Road. But not one of his own people. And certainly not Curtis Green from Spanish Fork, Utah.

  While this decision was daunting for DPR, at least one part of it would be easy: figuring out who would do the job. With so much cash on hand, it turned out there were plenty of people who were willing and able to murder someone—particularly in a barren stretch of Utah. Variety Jones had access to a man he simply called “Irish,” who could be dispatched—from Ireland—to Utah, where he would find Curtis and make him disappear. (One slight problem here was that Irish wasn’t very tech savvy, so retrieving the $350,000 in Bitcoins Green had stolen could prove to be a complicated challenge.) Inigo, another Silk Road employee and one of a few people DPR actually trusted implicitly, volunteered to go and take care of the problem himself, but he was way too important to the infrastructure of the site to be a foot soldier. So DPR decided the job would have to be done by Nob, the South American drug dealer he had become so close to.

  After all, it was Nob who had lost a kilo of “Colombia’s finest” when Green had been busted by the DEA a week earlier, a salient fact that Ross had discovered by a simple Google search of Curtis Green’s name after he didn’t show up to work one day, which had led him to a Web site that catalogued recent arrests.

  There, in all its glory, was the mug shot of his chubby employee.

  Ross hadn’t imagined this was what he would be dealing with when he woke on a cold winter’s morning in early 2013. At first when he found out about Green, the only thing he could do was feel sick to his stomach, as he told VJ in a chat. Then, a couple of hours later, the taste of vomit was quickly turning into one of vengeance.

  DPR spoke to all of his associates about what to do. There was a real fear that Green would sing to the cops about the Silk Road, telling the Feds about the innards of the site, how it worked, and who was involved with it
. That, plus the $350,000, left Ross with essentially three options for how to handle his rogue employee.

  The first possibility was the easiest: to simply pay a visit to Green at his home in Spanish Fork, Utah, and scare him into returning the money he had stolen. The second was more difficult—but definitely more just—and involved beating Green for his unscrupulous treason. Maybe one of DPR’s guys would bind Green to a chair, slap him around a bit, break a few fingers, a nose, threaten his family, and scare him into returning that money. But there was a problem with both of these choices: If word got out that it was okay to sing to the cops and steal hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, the Dread Pirate Roberts wouldn’t be the most feared pirate sailing the Dark Web, but rather a weakling pushover. The Silk Road would be known as a place where you could break the rules without reprisal.

  This led to the third option for Green: killing him.

  Decisions, decisions.

  How quickly life changes. One minute you’re making $300 a week as a college researcher. You’re sleeping in a basement and your only belongings are two black garbage bags, one full of clean clothes, the other dirty, and your biggest worry in the world is whether the pretty girl with the black curly hair whom you just met at the drum circle will call you back. Then an idea hits you. It starts as just a thought, like a kid’s daydream of a giant invention. But once it becomes lodged there in your mind, it won’t go away. Then something happens, like a bolt of lightning striking a kite, or mold accidentally contaminating an experiment, and you realize this idea is actually possible. You type lines of code into your computer and out comes a world that didn’t exist before. There are no laws here, except your laws. You decide who is given power and who is not. And then you wake up one morning and you’re not you anymore; you’re one of the most notorious drug dealers alive. And now you’re deciding if someone should live or die. You’re the judge in your own court. You’re God.

  But God wasn’t ready to end another man’s life. At least not yet. So he issued a directive to Nob to go off and find Green and have him roughed up.

  “I’d like him beat up. Then force him to send the Bitcoins he stole back,” DPR wrote to Nob. “Like sit him down at his computer and make him do it.” He then reiterated to Nob that getting the money back “would be amazing.”

  Nob said he would send his guys to Utah to do just that.

  But while Nob had set off to find Green, and Ross had issued a pardon of sorts, he still wasn’t sure this level of amnesty was the right decision. How could he let someone steal that much money from DPR and get away with a measly beating? The conundrum lay in the reality that violence was not something Ross was used to, though it was something he believed in when absolutely necessary.

  Back at Penn State, a short lifetime ago, while sitting in the Willard Building off Pollock Road, Ross had defended this very topic with Alex and his friends in the College Libertarians Club.

  “Yes, but the use of force is completely justified if you have to defend your own rights or personal property,” young Ross had argued while discussing one of the latest Murray Rothbard books he had devoured. Back then it had just been idealistic, hypothetical banter by a group of college students. The conversation had even followed some of the club members to the Corner Room bar on College Avenue, where, amid the sound of sports talk and the clink of pints of Samuel Adams, they had discussed Rothbard’s War, Peace, and the State, which explained why you could use violence against any “individual criminal” trying to harm you or steal your personal property.

  Now, as the Dread Pirate Roberts, the more Ross thought about it, the more he wondered if beating Green up would be enough of a punishment to deter others on the site from betrayal. He started to wonder if he might not have a choice but to put his libertarian theories to their ultimate test. Curtis Green had, after all, stolen DPR’s “personal property.” All $350,000 of it.

  As Ross weighed the decision, his chief adviser offered an alternate argument. “At what point in time do we decide we’ve had enough of someone’s shit, and terminate them,” Variety Jones asked rhetorically upon hearing about the theft. He no longer referred to Green by his name but simply as the “Organ Donor.” To VJ, heroin was harmful and he wanted no part of it, but murder, well, that was a completely different story.

  Given that Green had been arrested, Variety Jones (who knew a bit about actually being arrested) pointed out that the Organ Donor might strike a deal with the “Feebs” to divulge everything he knew about the Silk Road. Or he might skip the country, VJ cautioned, and disappear with DPR’s 350 grand.

  Soon other advisers jumped into the fray. “There are certain rules to the underworld,” one wrote to DPR. “And problems can sometimes only be handled one way.”

  All these devils on DPR’s shoulder, and the only angel was Ross Ulbricht. (It wasn’t like Ross could call up his best friend René in the real world and ask his opinion. Hey, buddy, got a minute? I’m thinking about having this guy killed for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in drug money from me. You think I should do it?)

  Given what everyone was saying to DPR, these arguments had started to make sense. This was not a playground; it was a fucking drug empire, and there had to be consequences to people’s actions. “If this was the Wild West, and it kinda is,” Ross replied to Variety Jones, “you’d get hung just for stealing a horse.”

  Exactly! Now you’re talking. VJ stoked the fire further, questioning what it would take before the sheriff of this Wild West did just that. “At what point in time is that the response,” Jones asked.

  “It’s a good question I’ve been thinking about the last 24 hours.”

  Finally, Variety Jones rang the final death knell. “So, you’ve had your time to think,” he said. “You’re sitting in the big chair, and you need to make a decision.”

  Ross, jump off a cliff.

  “I would have no problem wasting this guy,” DPR replied.

  And in eight words the hit was put out on Curtis Green. With a few strokes on his keyboard, the creator of the Silk Road had just sanctioned his first murder. Now he just had to find the right person to kill him.

  Chapter 43

  THE FBI JOINS THE HUNT

  It was 4:45 a.m. when the silver SUV pulled into its usual parking spot on the corner of Church and Thomas streets in Lower Manhattan. Right on time. The car had black tinted windows with government plates and blue and red police lights hidden under the front grill. The door to the SUV swung open and FBI Special Agent Chris Tarbell stepped out, wearing gym clothes and a light jacket, even though the winter temperature in New York City had dipped into the teens.

  Come rain or shine, sleet or snow, this was Tarbell’s ritual. He worked out every day before he went into the FBI offices at 26 Federal Plaza, a couple of blocks away. But today’s routine was going to be different. While the cybercrime FBI agents hadn’t lost interest in the Silk Road, that topic hadn’t moved past a discussion in the Whiskey Tavern among the Pickle Back shots and cham-pag-nay, mostly because of bureaucratic bullshit within the system that Tarbell couldn’t stand. Higher-ups at the Beau (which they pronounced “B-you”) had argued that drugs were not the mandate of their division of the FBI.

  But finally, after months of discussions over how to get in on the Silk Road case, an opportunity had presented itself. Later that day a woman from the DEA in New York City would be coming by to talk about the site and ask if Tarbell and his crew could help the DEA’s investigation.

  After leaving the gym, Tarbell changed into a dark suit and white shirt and grabbed his coffee from the nearby Starbucks before making his way up to the twenty-third floor of the federal building. As he sat with his other agents in the Pit, a woman from the DEA arrived with Serrin Turner, the assistant U.S. attorney in New York City whom the FBI had worked with on the LulzSec case.

  The DEA agent wore jeans and a sweater, proudly displaying her badge a
nd gun on her waist. She sat down in an empty chair and explained that she was part of a New York task force based a few miles away in Chelsea. They had been sporadically looking into—“well, trying to look into”—the Silk Road for the past year and a half, and their attempt at an investigation had gone nowhere. Shortly after the Gawker article had published back in June 2011, Senator Chuck Schumer had done what most politicians do, holding an impromptu press conference and demanding that the government go after the drug site, even though he was clueless as to what that entailed.

  Since the Silk Road sold drugs, the DEA agent explained, the government had asked her office to look into the site. That had been a mistake, it turned out, as her office knew how to do only physical busts with physical drugs, not digital busts with technologies like Bitcoin, Tor, or even the Dark Web, whatever the fuck that was.

  “People upstairs are pissed that we haven’t gotten very far,” she lamented. And then she explained that the leader of the site—“who now calls himself the Dread Pirate Roberts, you know, from the Princess Bride movie”—had grown more brazen with the contraband that was for sale, including hawking guns and hacking tools. What’s more, this Dread Pirate Roberts was publicly denouncing the U.S. government. The New York DEA had hit a dead end, and they needed the help of the FBI.

  When the meeting ended, Tarbell and his team said they would talk among themselves and be in touch. They shook hands and parted ways.

  “Well,” Tarbell said to the agents in the Pit, “there are two problems here.” First, his team didn’t want to just be “assistants” to the New York DEA. If the FBI was going to go after the Silk Road, the FBI was going to do it alone. The Beau didn’t work well with others. Never had. Especially the douche bags over at the DEA.

  Which led to that other salient issue: they had been told several times by their higher-ups at the FBI that drugs were not in their job detail; computers were.